Ships
- USS La Vallette (DD-448) Captain, 1 August 1945 – 1 October 1945
Edward Isham Gibson, a lieutenant commander in the United States Navy, took command of the destroyer La Vallette on 1 August 1945. His time in the ship lasted two months, ending on 1 October 1945. In the Navy of that period a lieutenant commander routinely served as captain of a destroyer, and the record places him in that role for those dates.
He came aboard near the end of the Pacific War. La Vallette, a Fletcher-class destroyer commissioned in August 1942 and named for the nineteenth-century naval officer Elie A. F. La Vallette, had already spent most of the war in the South and Central Pacific and in the Philippines. Japan’s government announced its acceptance of Allied terms on 15 August 1945, while Gibson was still in command, and the instrument of surrender was signed in Tokyo Bay on 2 September.
By the time Gibson assumed command, the ship’s hard fighting was behind her. Earlier in the war she had been badly damaged by a Japanese aerial torpedo during operations off Guadalcanal and had later struck a mine in Manila Bay in February 1945. Yard work on the West Coast followed that mining. His captaincy therefore covered the ship’s return to duty at the moment combat in the Pacific was ending, rather than a stretch of the campaigns that had made her name.
The two months were a change of task for the destroyer and her crew. With the shooting war finished, ships of her type shifted toward occupation support, patrol, and the movement of men and mail across waters that were suddenly open. La Vallette’s people, many of them veterans of the earlier campaigns, adjusted to a peacetime routine under a captain who had held the ship only since the first of August.
Gibson left La Vallette on 1 October 1945. His relief closed a short command that sat exactly across the surrender. The ship went on under later captains; Gibson’s recorded association with her is the captaincy of those two months, held in the rank of lieutenant commander.